Introduction
This is a book about the religious life of ordinary laypeople in high medieval
Italy. As such, it is an excursion into a mostly uncharted world, the lived
experience of orthodox religion in the Italian cities. Some readers might
find this characterization surprising, even shocking. Nothing could be better
known than what it meant to be ‘‘Catholic’’ Christians in the Italy of Saint
Francis and Dante. So historians of medieval religion have directed their
gaze and research elsewhere. During my first venture into the world of thir-
teenth-century Italian religion, more than fifteen years ago, I was surprised
to discover how little the day-to-day orthodox world had been studied. Older
scholarship produced studies of papal politics and scholastic theology, but
these treated only an ecclesiastical elite. In his classic study of medieval reli-
gious movements, Herbert Grundmann first suggested that high medieval
heresy, the mendicants, and women’s mysticism all formed part of a single
whole and deserved more attention.^1 Subsequent scholarship focused, almost
exclusively, on those three phenomena. A glance at the treatment of medie-
val religion in the Einaudi handbook of Italian history, itself the work of an
eminent scholar, shows an odd religious landscape.^2 Traditional scholarly
divisions rule: a section on the Gregorian Reform is followed by sections
dedicated to heresy and repression (pp. 609 – 733 ), the mendicant orders (pp.
734 – 874 ), and the Church’s institutional crises of the 1300 s (pp. 874 – 974 ).
Heretics, popes, theologians, Franciscans, and saints. Where is everyone
else?
- Herbert Grundmann,Religio ̈se Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2 d ed. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1961 ), translated
by Steven Rowan asReligious Movements in the Middle Ages(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1995 ). - For bibliography, see Giovanni Miccoli, ‘‘La storia religiosaiv: Limiti e contraddizioni della res-
taurazione postgregoriana,’’Storia d’Italia 2 : 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974 ), 431 – 1079 , and Alba Maria Orselli,
‘‘Vita religiosa nella citta`medievale italiana tra dimensione ecclesiastica e ‘cristianesimo civico’: Una
esemplificazione,’’Annali del’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 7 ( 1981 ): 361 – 98 , esp. 361 – 68.